SH604 - Crisis Management and Accident Prevention

Objectifs

Objectif général :

After completing this module, the student will be able to :
- Raise the participants’ awareness of the global threat an accident represents for an airline and how to better “manage this risk”. Understand that this is a global company-wide behavior. While not becoming specialists, the participants should hence:
- Have a better global understanding of all what is involved when having to face a crisis resulting from an aircraft accident or major incident involving fatalities or injured persons.
- Know about all the risks for the company, if the crisis is not handled adequately,
- Understand what needs to be looked into and for what a company needs to be prepared if it wants to emerge from the crisis with its reputation unharmed.
Be aware of all what is done to avoid such situation at global aviation industry level and in particular all what is done / can be done to enhance flight safety so as to continue to reduce the number of serious accidents.

Objectifs détaillés :

After completing this module, the student will be able to :
- Understand how the media and social media work and the role they play in an “accident crisis”, and to realize the importance of being fully “prepared” to face and handle the media thanks to trainings, and a crisis communications plan,
- Understand the importance for the company to be fully prepared to handle the accident consequences (dealing with the families and relatives) and that this cannot be improvised. And that this requires support from specialized external companies,
- Understand the role of the airports. They too need to be fully “prepared”, as they will have a major role to play in dealing with the victims of an accident - they are the “first responders” on the spot, as accidents mostly occur at airports.
- Understand that their role is to improve global air transportation safety, by looking into all the factors which may have contributed to the accident, even if only randomly. Realize that their role is not to apportion blame, but to draw lessons, which is the opposite of what the judicial enquiry is after. Also realize that there are different practices depending on the countries in which the accident occurs.
Be aware of the importance of safety so as to prevent accidents from occurring. Over the years safety increasing has allowed to significantly reduce the number of serious accidents. As there are hardly any accidents occurring because of technical problems, it is now important to be open to new methods which take much more into account the human elements. The courses dedicated to safety should raise the awareness of the participants to the need to be open minded with regards to managerial attitudes which will allow increasing safety to the benefit of the operator. This can be implemented globally or at the initiative of individual airlines.